


A Ghostly Paradigm

by aderyn



Series: Deep Map [17]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: (view from the) roof of Barts, Childhood, Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, Post Reichenbach, all the way back to the beginning, apples & I.O.U's, fairytales - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-07 00:35:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the roof, scatterings,speculation of starlings splitting and mending, the chemistry of boyhood and a handful of John.</p>
<p>He could see the beginning he wants John back to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Ghostly Paradigm

**Author's Note:**

> For [quarryquest](http://quarryquest.livejournal.com/),who prompted me with angels and Bart's and a palimpsest and school parties.
> 
> title from Yeats, "Among Schoolchildren"

 

He needs sleep more than anything. A respite, though he's never done well with those. He could dream.The roof again.

From up there he could see. He could see all the way to a coast of sorts, his city all river and spire, the grey planes, the dome of St. Paul’s,its humbler attendants; Smithfield with its chapels, its ancient reek of charnel and plague. He could see his own elegy, the things they won’t say and the tokens they won't leave.  London’s a book, a coin, a key, a hearse, a tomb. A palimpsest. A cache of learners, criminals; his own young self spinning in a centrifuge, the lost gems of all his chemicals, his notes, his streets.

He could see the beginning he wants John back to.  
  
He's going to be gone a long time.  
  
What will they say about him then.

*******

They slipped, once, barrelling towards a thief, into a nest of schoolchildren, skidded round laughing, harsh-breathed-- "All these you might have fathered, John." "There's one for you." (Sea-eyed, grey-eyed, owl-eyed, the stories they'll hear.) Later, cracking wise over _dim sum_ \-- _The Great Detective told in fairy form, to teach, to scare, to send to sleep. Apples and princes and threes._

John’s smile might have been a child’s, then. He wouldn’t rule it out.

*******

He'll never be public in that way, though, never be of use.

He’s not on anyone's side, he used to say, but his own.  But there are doves here, and angels. Or there were, on the roof, on all the roofs, somewhere above. The guardians of the about-to-drop, right there in the cotes, in the nuclei, in John’s bewildered, broken gaze, his wrist cocked like a pin in the bus-blasted drive.

Fraud, princess, villain, knight; it doesn’t matter now, what he is.

I might’ve pulled you from the grave, John would say, woken you, though I’d sooner send you to bed.

I’m, he thinks, absurd, the white mercury but for the tendency to sublime, the red and the blue and the black of the triatomic ...and well, that’s all. Spectra to hang the palace with, some salts and bonds and bricks, some loci.

*******

John never actually said he was innocent but once.

When you’re asleep, John said, smiling, and stopped, blinked, picked something small from the sleeve of the coat, touched him once, just between the brows.

“Ready?” John said, and he was,stunned.

Apples and crowns, then, and gilt and sugars and alcohols and blood. Indoles rising from the backseats of cabs and the sharp breaths of the tiny things of Marylebone, an I. O. U from the layers of home.

I owe you; I owe you; I owe you.

He can’t think like that, not really, not yet.

There was something else then, that John said as he slept--lashes and handcuffs and time--but thinking it carries him back to the roof, to the wrong wind, the wrong code, the wrong step; all the things he well, undid.

*******

When they were children they dreamt of one another without knowing and fell shrieking from great heights, peaked roofs and branches and bridges and swings, a tower, a lookout, the sky over England ablaze in an arc prediction of joy.

He’ll be old one day, if he makes it. They’ll be old if.

What then.

*******

He dares sometimes, after a kill, to think what they’ll say, how he survived, if he does; will they work the angles, the steps, the trajectories, theorize-- the students, the bloggers, the uni-brooders, the youthful eyes of the old city.

Will they figure it, miserably wrong.

Will John.

How he slipped to his knees, stiffening in the wind.

*******

He wasn’t alone up there.

Don’t think of that now.

Think of the chemical structures of things that don’t have them( _grace hope forgiveness_ ).

Think of the bridges in triplicate.

Think of the view.

*******

From the roof, scatterings,speculation of starlings splitting and mending, the chemistry of boyhood and a handful of John.

Too high, too sick, teeth too set with the verge, the machine of the plan, he saw his spires for the last time.

Now he dreams south, dreams east, strange, to the bird-carved spines of Blackfriars, his new spirit-bridge, east to the tidal turning point--the point then,of heartbreak,of flux and return.

*******

More than anything he wants to go home.  
  
You could, John said once, you could. And he meant be what mortals call happy, or something like.  
  
Those hands were what mortals call tender, he supposes. And those small soft voices to which he's never managed to connect because how, after these long years and rooftops and memory, _how_ , after that precipice, to go back—be that innocent, be that born.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [quarryquest's amazing posts on TRF and rooftops and Barts and much more.](http://quarryquest.livejournal.com/tag/reichenbach)   
> [Blackfriars Bridge, at the turning of the tide](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blackfriars.road.bridge.arp.750pix.jpg)   
> [St. Paul’s dome and its humbler attendants](http://lowres-picturecabinet.com.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/29/main/7/195420.jpg)   
> [Trees of St. Paul’s](http://www.londontrees.co.uk/st-pauls.html)   
> [The London Plane](http://www.londontrees.co.uk/london-plane.html)
> 
>  
> 
> "...The children learn to cipher and to sing,  
> To study reading-books and histories,  
> To cut and sew, be neat in everything  
> In the best modern way — the children’s eyes  
> In momentary wonder stare upon  
> A sixty-year-old smiling public man."--W.B. Yeats, "Among Schoolchildren"


End file.
